Miscellaneous thoughts and discoveries on genealogy, family history and family photos.

What Family History Terms Are People Searching For?

One of the most useful software features that has shown up on most web sites these days is something called “look-ahead” technology.

Here’s the idea. Let’s say you go to the Google web site and you’re looking for a way to hunt down relatives. You begin typing “find my relatives” into the search box. But as you type, Google lists a number of phrases that start with the characters that you’ve already typed–things that Google things you might be typing. So by the time you’ve typed “find my r”, it lists “find my relatives” as one possible thing that you might be searching for.

This is really useful because Google often seems to figure out what you’re going to type, long before you finish typing. Then you can just click on the phrase that you were going to type and proceed with your search.

How does this work? Here’s where “look-ahead” comes into play. Instead of waiting until you finish typing to search its database, Google takes what you’ve already typed and does a quick search in the database. But instead of searching for web sites, which is what happens when you press the “Google Search” button, it searches for things that other users have typed in the past.

The reason that this is useful is that people tend to search for things that other people have already searched for. You are definitely not the first person who has entered “find my relatives” into the Google search bar. So it suggests “find my relatives” as one possible sentence you might be typing.

So this is basically a big time saver for you, since you rarely have to type the entire phrase that you’d thought of into the search bar. Even better, you might see some phrases that are similar to yours that you had not thought of.

But Google doesn’t just list a bunch of things it thinks you might be typing. It lists the most common search phrases that match what you’re typing. What’s more, it orders the list by popularity, with the most common at the top.

This makes reading Google’s list of suggested search phrases very interesting. By typing a word or two, we can get some insight into what people are searching for.

So, What Are People Searching For?

So now the fun begins. Let’s enter a handful of interesting phrases into the Google search bar, to see what the most common searches are that start with that phrase.

find my ..

find my ip address

find my ip

find my congressman

find my house

find my spot

my family ..

my family tree

my family and other animals

myfamilytree.biz

myfamily.com

my family health portrait

genealogy ..

genealogy search

genealogy software

genealogy sites

genealogy free

genealogy websites

family photos ..

family photos ideas

family photos poses

family photos on the beach

family photos of barack obama

family photos what to wear

family tree..

family tree maker

family tree template

family tree search

family tree chart

family tree dna

family history ..

family history library

family history library catalog

family history free

family history questions

family history online

ancestors ..

ancestors search

ancestors.com

ancestors in the attic

ancestors definition

ancestors myspace

You get the idea. Google can tell you a lot about what people are searching for and that can be illuminating for certain search phrases.